When a massive hoard of treasure was discovered in the vaults of a Hindu temple in Kerala last year one question begged for an answer: who owns it?

Should the state take ownership of the heaps of gold and caskets of jewels – perhaps India’s largest temple treasure trove — and use it for public benefit? After all, some believe the wealth beneath the Padmanabhaswamy temple was amassed by the temple’s royal owners through the collection of “discriminatory” taxes.

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Or did it belong to the former royal family whose ancestors were said to have offered it to the temple deity, Sree Padmanabha Swamy? Or should it remain in the temple?

The senior lawyer advising the Supreme Court on the answer is in no doubt.

“This treasure belongs only to the deity,” said Gopal Subramanium, who is acting as amicus curiae to the Supreme Court in a case to decide who should administer the temple’s wealth.

The litigants include the head of the former royal family, Marthanda Varma, and those representing T.P. Sundararajan, a temple devotee who initially petitioned the Kerala High Court to open up the temple vaults but died in July 2011 shortly after they were opened.

“In Hindu law a deity is considered to be a living person which can hold property, therefore the property or the treasure belong only to the deity and there is no substitution of the deity with the state,” Mr. Subramanium said. Indian law grants religious figures the status of juristic persons with the right to hold property in their name.

When Mr. Subramanium’s report for the Supreme Court was published in November, Pinarayi Vijayan, state secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which is the main opposition in Kerala, questioned its recommendations about the administration of the riches. But Mr. Subramanium disagrees.

“The Communist party believe that this wealth belongs to the people,” said Mr. Subramanium, a former solicitor general of India. “With respect I can’t agree.”

No-one at the Communist Party of India (Marxist) was available for comment.

Mr. Subramanium told India Real Time that the discovery of the treasure had sparked a “sudden interest” among politicians in the administration of Padmanabhaswamy temple in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala’s capital.

“The political class wants to get into the temple,” he said. “Many politicians have become managers in temples and I would want to ask ‘What do they know about the temple?’ I’m keeping politicians away.”

Instead, he recommends that the temple be administered by a chief executive officer who will act on the advice of Marthanda Varma –the head of the former royal family – and the temple’s priests.

The temple, which is mentioned in six puranas (ancient Hindu texts) is dedicated to Lord Vishnu. A figure of Lord Vishnu lies inside the temple, according to Mr. Subramanium’s report to the Supreme Court “on a coiled serpent …his right hand is stretched downwards for worshipping Lord Shiva.”

A lotus flower (padma) sprouts from his navel and Lord Brahma, the creator, sits inside it.

It’s not the first time that law governing the property rights of deities has been discussed by the courts in India.

In 2007, the Hindu deities Ram and Hanuman were summoned to court by a judge in Jharkhand in a 20-year dispute involving land that housed temples dedicated to deities who had failed to respond to previous summons.

Since 1989, Ram also has been a litigant in the long-running legal dispute over whether Hindus or Muslims have title to the site where the former Babri Masjid stood in Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh. The mosque was torn down by Hindu activists in 1992.

A decision by the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court in the case in 2010 awarded one third of the disputed property, the area under the former central dome of the mosque, to Ram. The case is now on appeal before the Supreme Court.

In a separate case, Mumbai’s High Court ruled in 2010 that deities did not have the right to open up online “demat” accounts to trade in listed stocks and debentures because of the difficulty of bringing them to court in case of fraud.

But in the case of an estimated one trillion rupees ($18.2 billion dollars) of solid assets, Sree Padmanabha Swamy, a version of Lord Vishnu, is the rightful owner, Mr. Subramanium maintains.

“This is peculiar to India and it’s because of the traditional Hindu law and the deity is still a person,” he said.

Does he think the rights of deities to own property under Indian law will ever change?

“I cannot say, it will be somewhat premature on my part to ever stagnate possibilities of change of human thought and belief,” Mr. Subramanium said, though he then added: “I think human thought and belief necessarily, in view of the constant evolution of the universe, need to change and will change.”

Joanna Sugden is freelance journalist living in Delhi. Before coming to India in 2011 she spent four-and-a-half years as a reporter at The Times of London, covering religion and education. You can follow her on Twitter @jhsugden.

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